


At Ease

by Tierfal



Series: Figments [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Romance, Schmoop, date night... OR IS IT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:22:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27677330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Roy prides himself on his impregnability, but there is something toweringly beautiful about being understood.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Series: Figments [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954360
Comments: 44
Kudos: 464





	At Ease

**Author's Note:**

> @me, OI, way to sit on a fic for ages again. I had bits of this one swimming around in my head, but then I was listening to Bastille and the line "How do you always know when I'm down?" from 'Joy' immediately pushed everything into place… months ago.
> 
> And then I also wrote (and commenced sitting on) the next one. Oh, well. I hope you enjoy!! ♥

By six, Roy was exhausted, and he knew that he’d have to book it home if he didn’t want them to be more-than-fashionably late. There was already at least one usher at this theater with designs on his life after what they’d done in that hallway last month, and he didn’t know enough about theatrical management politics to hazard whether ushers usually shared their misgivings about Roy’s moral character with the ticket office. Roy didn’t really fancy pushing his luck.

If it was any other night, and any other circumstance, he would have come up with a glib excuse—or possibly even used a real one, such as _This stack of files is so heavy that picking it up to carry them to the car instantaneously gave me grievous back pain. I am cleverly planning to work through them all day tomorrow and give myself a hell of a headache to go with it; back pain oughtn’t be lonely, you know_.

The reason that Roy was not going to do either of those things was that _he_ wasn’t—lonely, that was. Not lately. And especially not tonight.

Because Ed usually spent the week assiduously working at the library and equally assiduously hounding Al about finishing homework, Saturdays tended to be dedicated to rewarding Al for enduring all of the hounding. But it had come about, by the odd little additive happenstances that so often decided the most important things, that Friday nights were Roy’s.

Ninety-seven percent of Roy’s exhaustion was directly work-related—it had been a beast of a week and a monster of a day, during which he’d been _shouted at_ in no fewer than two meetings—but the remaining three percent was edged with a peculiarly acute sort of terror.

Roy was still finding quite a lot of things for them to do to occupy themselves on Friday nights, including but not limited to traumatizing unsuspecting theater ushers, but there were only so many theaters and only so many museums and only so many restaurants with live music in Central City.

The relationship was going… well. Very well. Suspiciously well. Well enough that Roy was glancing up with increasing frequency to check for the other shoe. But if it _kept_ going well… 

He certainly intended to facilitate that, as much as humanly possible, in the very selfish interests of continuing to admire Ed across candlelit tables; appreciate him in dim theater hallways with velvet curtains; and, increasingly, do some admiring and appreciating and quite a lot of idle talking in Roy’s own home as well.

The home which he’d promised Ed that he’d be back to by five thirty at the latest tonight.

The point, though—other than the fact that he was already late, so he’d already lied—was that he was, at this rate, mathematically doomed to run out of charming little date excursions. With his luck, it would probably happen sooner rather than later. Maybe he could start taking Ed on shopping trips instead—to bookstores, for instance. Ed was every bit as enamored of Roy’s personal library as Roy had ever dared to hope, despite the pertinent detail that these days Ed spent the entirety of his work week among their brethren. It was, frankly, sickeningly heartwarming that Ed hadn’t lost a single iota of that enthusiasm over the years.

Exhaustion usually wore at Roy’s resolve like the sea at sandstone. Tonight was no exception. Was that it? Had he foreseen his own destiny? He would eventually deplete an entire city’s worth of Friday night experiences, and Ed would grow so bored of Roy’s unalleviated company that he’d… what? Walk out? Pick fights? Just… stop coming back?

Roy liked him. Roy _really_ liked him. That was the curious part, if ‘curious’ could apply to a moth circling a flame, well-aware of how its own wings smelled when they started singeing. Both of them had changed—subtly, for the most part; a settling more than a shift. But in the strangest way, with their edges altered, suddenly they… fit.

Ed was fun. He was searingly smart, of course, but also wittier than he thought he was, and unintentionally charismatic and terribly disarming and funny and insightful and interesting and utterly unique. Roy had not once heard him raise his voice since they’d started this two months ago in the wake of Jean’s and Rebecca’s wedding.

Ed had nothing to fear anymore. He had nothing to hide.

And he was so, so, _so_ mind-bendingly, joint-ruiningly beautiful.

Roy had been accused of idiocy more than once—and, he maintained, more times than he _quite_ deserved—but he was not and never would be fool enough to believe that someone like Ed could pass unnoticed. Ed had a city full of other choices. And Roy had a swiftly-dwindling supply of Friday nights.

He did have this one, at least so far—but it was already twenty minutes after six, and he was only just pulling up in front of the house, and he still had to change, and to _try_ to make himself presentable, and to figure out something for dinner that was fast but good but not too crowded, and—

And there was a light on in his house.

He’d told Ed that he’d be arriving almost an hour before he’d actually managed it just now. Ed had not yet noticeably begrudged him his fairly creative interpretation of the time-space continuum—Ed’s words, not Roy’s—not least because Ed knew firsthand how it so often went in the office. Obviously, Roy did not expect Ed to sit on his front porch in the dark and wait for him, chin in hands; but he pulled one glove on and slipped his hand into his pocket as he started up the walk. Just… in case.

There had to be a limit to it, didn’t there? To the forgiveness. To the generosity. To the lack of begrudgement. People got tired of one another. That was what people did; that was how people worked. They acclimated to each other’s habits, and then they over-acclimated, and they started to find each other annoying, and they zeroed in on the parts that they liked the least. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. The human brain fixated. Roy’s recurring lateness would look like negligence after a certain point—precisely where the line fell he couldn’t fathom, but he imagined that he’d trip over it soon enough. It had to look, from an outside perspective, like he didn’t care enough about _Ed’s_ time to keep his off-handed promises. It had to look like he was already taking Ed’s patience for granted.

When he came up to the front door, he could tell that the light inside emanated from the library, which made his supposition likelier still. A common thief would ignore his library altogether, blissfully unaware of how valuable many of its contents were; and an uncommon thief would not leave a light on and hang around waiting for him to unlock two deadbolts and then the knob.

Also, the instant that the door was open, Ed’s voice called “Hey!”, so Roy peeled the glove back off, shoved it into his pocket, and locked the door again behind him.

“Hay is for horses,” he said, prying his boots off next. “Oh, wait.”

When he came into view of the doorway to the library, Ed was grinning at him broadly, spinning back and forth in Roy’s chair, using the foot that he’d braced against an end table—the foot that wasn’t metal, at least—for leverage.

“Can’t believe I’ve already got you making farm jokes,” Ed said. “It’s adorable. I’m so glad you got one of these chairs for your house, too. I really missed doing this with the one in your office.”

“I cannot tell you,” Roy said, “how glad I am that my furniture choices pass muster so th…” Ed stretched both arms over his head, and his right hand caught Roy’s eye, whipping the rest of that sentence right out of his throat. He considered, reconsidered, and then said, “How did you get in?”

Ed continued stretching until both of his shoulders cracked. “Without alchemy, you mean?”

At Roy’s silent nod, he arched an eyebrow, and the angle of his smile made it evident that the question didn’t hurt. Roy had been trying to get a handle on that one for the past two months, but he didn’t want to risk stabbing a probing finger into any open wounds that looked scabbed-over from a distance.

“I noticed the last time I was over,” Ed was saying, “that the latch on your living room window was coming really loose. So I let myself in.”

Roy listened to his heartbeat in his ears for a few seconds, scrabbling for control of himself. It was fine—lucky, but fine. Ed was the _only_ person who had broken in. And there wasn’t any trace of disdain in Ed’s voice despite the fact that Roy Mustang, paranoid politician extraordinaire, was stupid enough to bolt his front door twice while leaving a _window_ —

Ed spun a full circle in the chair this time, then put his foot out to catch himself and stop his momentum. “Then I fixed it.”

Roy blinked again. He was feeling altogether too many things at once to be expected to understand any of them on an individual level. Hopefully he wouldn’t have a heart attack. He’d heard that those were painful, and he very much doubted that they’d make the play. “You…”

“With a hammer,” Ed said. He spun the chair again, which was not doing any favors for Roy’s beleaguered system. “Okay. Actually with a screwdriver. It took about forty seconds. Well—finding the screwdriver took ten minutes, because the last place I expected you to keep tools was a toolbox. Seems too obvious. Aren’t you supposed to be sneaky?”

“I live in hope,” Roy said, “that the history books will say something more like ‘politically canny and cunningly strategic’, but I… will make sure to hide my tools next time.”

All of the scrabbling inside himself for rationality had yielded up one lifeline: he could still barrel on and pretend that the world hadn’t, in some small but meaningful measure, fallen down around his ears. That one had certainly served him well in the past.

He reached into his breast pocket and extracted the two tickets that he’d kept there all day; they always felt safer there. “Can I interest you in a performance of ‘The Fountain of Astova’ at eight?” he asked. “The reviews were exactly the type to suggest that it’s either brilliantly good or hilariously bad. I think that if we stop by that Xingese place that you like on the way over, we can still make it.”

Ed’s smile twisted. Roy’s heart followed suit.

“I mean,” Ed said, slowly, as Roy stood very, very still and waited for the axe to fall; “sure. We could do that. _Or_ …” He spun the chair. “We could stay here and order in instead, and you could tell me why your day was so shit, and then you could get to bed before midnight and maybe even get some sleep.”

Roy stared at him, still holding up the tickets like he was trying to flag down a cab. “You…” 

Roy waited.

Roy rummaged.

Roy couldn’t think of a damn thing to do or say or ask that didn’t lean heavily upon the truth. 

“When,” he said, carefully, “did you get so good at reading people?”

The real question was _When did you get so good at reading_ me _,_ but that felt too presumptuous even now.

Ed was smiling still—a little one, with a hint of mischief but no trace of malice.

“When Al first got his face back,” Ed said, turning the chair back and forth just a few inches in either direction, “he couldn’t control his expressions. He just reacted to everything, totally genuine, right off the bat. And he really didn’t like being such an open book all of a sudden, so he tried to get so much control over them that he wouldn’t have anyexpressions at _all_. We had a really creepy two weeks where he just looked kinda bored the whole time. And then he started working them back in, and he started letting in the little things like the gestures and the vocal cues and stuff—so I was paying a hell of a lot of attention to those, and I was cataloguing all of ’em against the things that he’d used to do in the armor to telegraph feelings when he didn’t have a face to work with.” He shrugged. “It was practically the only thing _to_ do out there, so I got pretty good at it.”

Roy lowered his hand. A tiny part of him wanted to protest that he really had been looking forward to the play; that he really did feel like they ought to make the most of their evening; that he wasn’t too tired; that he wasn’t worn thinner than Ed’s left-foot sock; that he wasn’t overwhelmed; that he wasn’t overtaken; that he wasn’t giving _up_ —

“I see,” he said.

Ed hooked his right foot over his left ankle, metal heel propped up on the end table. The increasingly frequent and unerringly cavalier abuse of various and sundry home goods should have bothered Roy quite a lot more than it did.

“Corollary,” Ed said, which was, tragically enough, one of his more graceful segues. “It’s not that I’m tryin’ to complain about your feverish devotion to attending every single play and gallery opening and any other cultural event that you can bribe a man for tickets to, but… you know that we can just… not, right?”

Roy’s heart banged in his head. He wasn’t entirely sure that he could feel the two slips of cardstock held between his fingertips.

“I’m not going to the plays,” Ed said, blinking at him serenely, “because I’ve got plans to quit my job and become a theater critic. I’m doing it because I like spending time with you. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Have you _met_ me?”

Roy listened to his heart beat in his ears some more, which seemed like the sensible thing to do. For one thing, it demonstrated that he was, in fact, still alive; for another, it was helping him to fight the impulse to say _I did meet you, once. I knew then, and I know so much better now, that you’re special. I want you to feel like it. I want_ you _to know that you are._

Too early for that. Eternity would probably be too soon.

Roy collected the scattered shrapnel from the recent Ed-induced explosion in his brain—it had been a while since he’d participated in this particular scavenger hunt, and he couldn’t say that he enjoyed it more now than he had in its previous iterations—and cleared his throat.

“If you’re sure,” he said, slowly.

Ed rocked up out of the chair, shoved his hands into his pockets, and grinned. “I’m sure that I’m hungry enough to wanna call the Xingese place right this minute. And I’m pretty sure that your story about your lousy day is going to be more interesting than the play would’ve been anyway. If you wanna get a refund on the tickets, just call ’em and tell ’em that you’re spitting blood; they never want to ask too many questions if you lead with that. Especially if you sound kinda pleased about it.”

Roy stepped back out of the doorway to let Ed pass. “That sounds like more fun than the fake-cough-into-the-receiver strategy.”

Ed winked at him, which was incredibly unfair.

Apparently Ed wasn’t above a parting shot, either, but Ed hadn’t been above very much in all of the time that Roy had known him. “Do you even _like_ theater?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Roy said.

Just not as much as he liked Ed.

Two phone calls, fifty minutes, and a significantly more comfortable clothing change than the one that he’d expected later, Roy found himself sprawled on his living room couch with a waxed paperboard box and a pair of chopsticks, trying not to laugh emphatically enough to fling shreds of cabbage into Ed’s hair.

After Ed had wheedled some of the worst of the travails out of Roy, he’d insisted on Roy giving him physical descriptions of the day’s worst offenders so that Ed could draw caricatures of them. Roy would never have anticipated that Ed could listen like this—or that he would have such an eye for the artistic element, let alone such a hand for it.

The one thing that Roy knew very much for sure was that he had never laughed this hard in a theater in his life.

“There’s something about the shape of his face, I think,” Roy was saying, “that’s a bit more… a bit shrewish? Weak chin, long nose—”

“Shouldn’t make fun of people’s noses, Mustang,” Ed said, right hand dancing across the page as he calmly adjusted the sketch to capture Colonel Greighton’s aspect so aptly that one might have suspected him of cheating. Roy, however, knew for a fact that Ed hadn’t set foot in Central Command even once in the past half-decade, which made all of it even more impressive.

“I’m not making fun,” Roy said. “I’m describing. And it’s working, because that’s perfect.”

The shadow of Ed’s bangs in the warm light hid part of his face, but not enough that Roy couldn’t see how broadly he was grinning. “Told you this’d be better than the play.”

“You do know,” Roy said, leaning forward in spite of himself, forgetting the food in his hands for the hundredth time tonight, “that this is an extremely remarkable skill. When did you pick _this_ up?”

Ed shrugged. He gave Greighton a few corkscrew-curl nose hairs. They were a bit uncalled for, and _utterly_ hilarious. “The therapist I was going to back home kept telling me that I should try to find a creative outlet. This was the easiest thing, because I could carry a sketchbook and a pencil everywhere, and at least drawing clouds is better than just staring at ’em all day long. I’ve got, like, forty million sketches of Al sleeping, back at the house. It kind of helps a lot of the time. But sometimes it makes it worse, because on the days when my hand just won’t cooperate with my brain, I feel like I’m losing something new on top of all of the old stuff. Freaks me the fuck out.”

Roy stayed very still, pretending that he didn’t know that he still had his chopsticks raised. This was just as bad as the tickets. He would have accused Ed of enjoying it if he’d thought for an instant that Ed had noticed his current predicament—Ed’s full attention was on his pencil as he turned it over in his fingertips.

Ed had just explained so much—so many of the little ill-fitting puzzle pieces that Roy had been trying to size up from a distance—so swiftly that Roy felt like they were both spinning out into the stars.

Very bright out here. Very cold.

“If it’s serving you well,” Roy said, softly, “even sometimes, then I’d say it’s more remarkable yet.”

Ed half-smiled down at the pencil.

Then he whole-smiled up at Roy, and then he arced an eyebrow. At least that part looked familiar.

“Hey,” Ed said. “If you like those plays so much, maybe you should try that—acting, I mean. I bet you’d be a natural.”

Roy knew several people who would instantly, eagerly back that bet. “I… imagine that it might attract the wrong kind of attention, and possibly the wrong audience.”

“So do it under a fake name,” Ed said. “Tell the director or whoever’s casting who you are and why you’re doing it, and only take roles that’ll put you in a costume where nobody’ll be able to tell. You’ll never know if you like it if you don’t give it a shot.”

Roy looked at him.

Then Roy picked up a single noodle and held it out to him with the chopsticks.

Ed snapped it up like a deep-sea predator suddenly surfacing and then calmly went back to adding some shading to his latest masterpiece. It was much more artistic than Greighton deserved, nose hairs notwithstanding.

“Come on,” Ed said. “When was the last time that you had fun?”

“About two minutes ago,” Roy said. The part of him that wanted to specify _With you_ was identifiably self-destructive, so he sent it to bed without supper. Prior experience had taught him many times that it wouldn’t get the hint, but hopefully the thought still counted. “Or do you mean on purpose?”

Ed gave him a combination of smirk and eyebrow that made it eminently clear that he knew that Roy had heard him, and that he wouldn’t deign to repeat himself.

It was not—it was _not_ —Roy’s fault that he’d tumbled so heedlessly into the midst of this.

“Just think about it,” Ed said. “You get to a point where you have to start doing stuff for you, just because you _can_ , even if you’re not sure yet if it’s a good idea or not. If you’re just doing things that other people want you to all the time, you start to lose track of who you are.”

“I’ll think about it,” Roy said.

It was a promise that he intended to try to keep, but he’d intended a awful lot of things.

  


* * *

  


Lying in a fine, warm bed and drifting towards sleep with Edward Elric just beside him was a bliss that Roy knew quite well that he didn’t deserve. He also knew quite well that he would take it every single time that it was on offer.

“Hey,” Ed said, nudging Roy’s shoulder with his.

“Mm,” Roy said. He kept his eyes closed.

“Hey,” Ed said, speaking louder and nudging harder.

Roy tried again, still with his eyes closed, but with calculated inflection. “Mm?”

“I wanna tell you something,” Ed said.

Roy opened one eye a sliver. Even a sliver of Ed was enticing. He had done this to himself, hadn’t he? Hook, line, sinker, fillet knife.

He could still be a bastard on purpose, though. He would always have that.

“ _Mm_?” he said.

Ed rolled his eyes so hard that they were probably in substantial danger, which was a shame.

“Fine,” Ed said. “Listen.” He waggled his eyebrows and offered up a cheesy grin. “I had a great time tonight. We should do this again sometime.”

Roy couldn’t help smiling back at him. So much for the sweet embrace of sleep. “Should we?” he said. “All… right. If you want to.” He considered. “I suppose I had better piss off some new people, then, so that you have different faces to draw.”

Ed snickered. “Shouldn’t be too hard. You piss people off all the time.”

“Please,” Roy said. “You’re making me blush.”

Ed’s grin settled to a thinner, softer, gentler smile again. “Mean it, though. About the night, not the pissing people off. Though that _is_ a hell of a talent. I would know.”

It wasn’t just that Roy was afraid of losing Ed’s attention or his affection, like with Maes; like with most of the others.

It was that Roy was afraid of losing him, full stop.

And Roy was afraid of what it _could_ be. What it could become. What it could turn him into; what it could reduce him to. Passing his hand through a flame like a party trick was one thing. Lying down atop a pyre and getting comfortable was another.

Roy _really_ liked Ed.

Roy loved him—more than a little bit.

Acknowledging it in the safety of his well-protected mind while tucked into a warm bed, with the haze of drowsiness pressing him down into the sheets, was marginally less terrifying than it probably would have been at another time.

Tonight had made it even easier to do, and even harder to escape. Ed would never hurt him on purpose. Ed wasn’t bored yet. Ed was invested enough in _Roy’s_ happiness to push him gently in an uncertain direction, and then to wake him up to reassure him that all three of those things were still true.

This might have qualified as one of those selfish choices that Ed was telling him to make, if it had ever been a choice at all.

“I had a lovely time,” Roy said. “I would pay to watch you draw and make commentary on my kvetching all night. Keep that in mind if you ever get tired of your library job.”

Ed’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Kinky.”

Roy projected as much innocence as humanly possible into his smile. “What can I say? Another of my gifts.”

“Changed my mind,” Ed said, prodding the edge of his pillow. “You should go to sleep.”

Roy reached out and tucked Ed’s hair back behind his ear, dragging the fingertip very slowly around the curve and ghosting it along Ed’s neck before he retracted his hand. Touching him was every bit as sublime as talking to him. The fact that the two had settled so evenly from the start should have made Roy realize a lot sooner.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” Ed said. “You paid for the food.”

“You were instrumental to the consumption of it,” Roy said. “I would have been entirely hopeless on my own.”

Ed smiled. “Huh. Guess so. Well—glad I could help.”

Ed knew precisely what they were actually talking about, which was all that Roy really wanted, so snuggling in with the pillow and attempting to reestablish the glorious doze sounded like his next move. Ed rolled onto his back. He was still smiling. Roy’s heart was too old and far too beaten-down for this.

“Hey,” Ed said, just as Roy was trying to savor a last look at him. “If you ever want to do it the other way around—y’know, if I pay for the food, and you provide the entertainment—that sounds pretty good, too.”

Roy kept his voice soft and his smile softer. “I will certainly keep that in mind.”

“Good,” Ed said. “Okay, the last item on our agenda was you getting some sleep for a change. Hop to it.”

“Yes, sir,” Roy said. “Very good, sir.”

“Amazing,” Ed said. “You must be the only person on the planet who can go to sleep and run your mouth at the same time.”

“Like I said,” Roy said. “Many talents.”

Ed twisted enough to eye him.

Roy grinned back.

“G’night, already,” Ed said.

The heat in Roy’s chest didn’t burn just yet. “Goodnight, Ed.”

“Sleep tight,” Ed said. “Don’t let Colonel Greighton’s nose hairs bite.”

They had, of course, had little faces with sharp teeth by the end of the evening, but at the moment that unfortunately wasn’t the point.

Roy was ethically obligated to say: “Now who’s running his mouth?”

Ed tried—and failed—to smother his laughter in the pillow. In _his_ pillow. The pillow that he’d selected from Roy’s bed, which had previously been Roy’s property and was now unequivocally his own.

Roy should have felt so, so much more afraid. That was the real danger of it: the venom numbed the wound around the injection site. By the time it had filtered into your bloodstream—

“I thought,” Roy said, “that we weren’t supposed to make fun of noses.”

“We’re not,” Ed said. “This is nose _hairs_.”

“You’ve never met him,” Roy said. “Or his nose hairs.”

“Nose hairs in the abstract,” Ed said.

“In the strangest way,” Roy said, giving in and opening his eyes again, “it’s a genius solution. The next time that he tries to berate me in a meeting, I’ll be imagining his carnivorous nose hairs in the abstract, and I’m going to laugh semi-hysterically in his face. He won’t have the slightest idea why. I’ll immediately have the upper hand.”

Opening his eyes had been the right call: the cheeky grin that Ed gave him was worth every second of forsaken sleep. “You’re welcome. Would you believe me if I said I planned that the whole time?”

“No,” Roy said.

“Me neither,” Ed said.

“That doesn’t change the fact,” Roy said, “that I am going to get you the best sketchbook that money can buy.”

“So soon,” Ed said. “So _soon_ , he forgets about how he promised me a fancy sword.”

“I’m sure I can split the difference,” Roy said. “Someone out there must be clever enough to make fancy-sword-shaped pens.”

“Don’t buy me nice stuff,” Ed said. “I’ll probably just… sit on it. Or leave it in the rain on accident. Or lose my bag. Always do.”

“Then I’ll replace them,” Roy said.

Ed held both hands over his eyes, which did little to conceal the way that he was grinning up at the ceiling. “You’re as bad as Al.”

“I’d like that in writing,” Roy said.

“With a fancy-sword pen?” Ed asked.

“Preferably,” Roy said. “But I’m not picky.”

Ed rolled onto his side, facing Roy now, and reached out with his right hand. Before Roy had the faintest notion of whether to retreat or to meet him halfway, Ed had extended his index finger and started tracing loopy letters across Roy’s collarbones.

“ _You’re_ ,” he intoned, “ _as bad… as Al_. How’s that?”

“Very nice,” Roy said. “I think I’d like all future accusations to be delivered in that format.”

Ed fake-eyed him. “How about the accusation that you’re a devious sleep-avoider?”

“Especially that one,” Roy said.

Ed’s fingers curled into a fist, which pressed itself against Roy’s chest for a fraction of a second before he withdrew it and settled on his back again, pointedly closing his eyes. “Well, it’s a good thing that I’m not. It’s important to have balance in a relationship.”

Roy made a moderate show of adjusting the pillow. “I _can_ take a hint, you know.”

Another tantalizing flash of a grin. “You sure?”

“Goodnight, Ed,” Roy said. “Again.”

“ _G’night_ , Mustang,” Ed said, but he still hadn’t stopped smiling by the time Roy closed his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> FKDALSFKA I initially forgot to add this, because I never do end notes!
> 
> If you were wondering about that gun that I borrowed from Chekhov and put up on the wall, spoilers: yes, Roy is going to do theater in a later installment. Yes, I am going to work in weird details from my atypical theater experiences. Yes, we are all going to regret our life choices. XD


End file.
